Theorizing New Realities: EU foreign policy facing new challenges
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce yet another fully-funded workshop on “Theorizing New Realities: EU foreign policy facing new challenges” in Aarhus, Denmark, from 11-12 November 2019.
The abstract submission/application deadline is 25 September 2019.
Further information is available below, here, and in the attached document.
Theorizing New Realities: EU foreign policy facing new challenges
This workshop aims to produce a collection of new theoretical perspectives or conceptual frameworks that can help us to better analyse and understand the global environment in which the EU cultivates its foreign relations. We will start from the hardly controversial premise that the EU faces considerable internal and external challenges. The workshop will focus on the external challenges, including a less friendly US, a more assertive Russia, an emerging superpower China and an increasingly instable neighbourhood. Workshop participants will examine the interplays between ontology (realities, social and/or material) and epistemology (how can we know?). Scholarship tends to refrain from engaging in creative theorizing and instead relies on applying or reproducing conventional perspectives. The global environment in which the EU operates has been conceptualized very differently, including a global public domain, an (anarchical) international society, an international system with changing configurations of power, or a global polity. The new realities offer a unique opportunity to break intellectual inertia.
Contributions may focus on analytical challenges such as:
- Conceptual issues including consequences – analytical and normative – of employing old and new concepts
- Engaging in ‘deep theorizing’, e.g. along the lines suggested by Felix Berenskoetter (2018)
- Occidentalist representations of Europe/the European Union
- EEAS conceptual understandings of the new realities/international order. Ways of seeing the world, with a special view to EU diplomats
- Comparing existing theories to a theory built by a participant of the workshop
- Do the ‘new realities’ sufficiently dominate over the ‘old realities’ to require new theories? In other words, contributions addressing classic issues such as old/new and change/continuity
When & where? 11-12 November 2019 at Aarhus University.
Planned Outcomes: We are particularly interested in submissions that show strong potential for inclusion in a joint publication.
Funding: The workshop is organized by the EU-COST Action ENTER and the project EURDIPLO. Participants will be reimbursed through the COST framework for their travel and accommodation expenditures within the scope of COST Rules.1
How to apply: Please send the following to Knud Erik Jørgensen kej@ps.au.dk by 25. September 2019: title of paper, abstract of about 200 words, your full name, position, institution, year you obtained/will obtain your PhD, email address, and website.
We are looking forward to seeing you in Aarhus: Knud Erik Jørgensen (Aarhus University), F. Asli Ergül Jorgensen (Ege University)
Website: www.foreignpolicynewrealities.eu
Twitter: @EUFPNewReality
1 Special Information for Prospective Applicants from the United Kingdom: We have been informed by the COST Association that in the event of a no-deal Brexit, expenses incurred by UK-affiliated researchers in the framework of COST activities may become ineligible. We therefore suggest that prospective spring school applicants from the UK consider reimbursement possibilities from other sources should we be unable to reimburse them after the training school. For more information, please contact the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy of the UK Government (www.gov.uk/beis | https://twitter.com/beisgovuk).